Techdirt. Stories filed under "shakespeare"Easily digestible tech news...https://www.techdirt.com/
en-usTechdirt. Stories filed under "shakespeare"https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/td-88x31.gifhttps://www.techdirt.com/Wed, 19 Dec 2012 14:56:44 PSTChoose Your Own Hamlet Becomes The Largest Publishing Project On Kickstarter, Thanks To The Public DomainMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20121219/11025021439/choose-your-own-hamlet-becomes-largest-publishing-project-kickstarter-thanks-to-public-domain.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20121219/11025021439/choose-your-own-hamlet-becomes-largest-publishing-project-kickstarter-thanks-to-public-domain.shtmlTo Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure, has become the most funded publishing project on Kickstarter ever, as it recently surpassed $400,000 (he was originally seeking $20,000). While we always love to see interesting and successful crowdfunding projects, this one is interesting for a few additional reasons concerning topics we talk about here: copyright and trademarks. The actual book is, as North explains, "an illustrated, chooseable-path book version of William Shakespeare's Hamlet." So, how does that hit on copyright and trademark issues?

Copyright: Even if the head of the Author's Guild doesn't seem to know this, Shakespeare's works are in the public domain, meaning that anyone can use them however they want -- whether it's to make an exact copy (and, yes, there are plenty of those on the market) or to do a derivative work. There have been tons of remakes and updates on Shakespeare's work, and many of them are super creative, such as this one. Kinda demonstrates just how ridiculous it is for copyright maximalists to argue that without strong copyright protection, creativity gets killed off. Just the opposite, it seems. The ability to build on the works of the past quite frequently inspires amazing new creativity.

Trademark: North refers to this as a "choosable path adventure" because:

"Chooseable-path" you may recognize as a trademark-skirting version of a phrase and book series you remember from childhood. Remember? Books in which... an adventure is chosen??

Yes, they're not using the widely known phrase "choose your own adventure," because it's trademarked, and the owner of the mark has sued before. Of course, the story of the mark is interesting in its own right. Apparently, Bantam Books who helped popularize the original choose your own adventure books let the trademark lapse, and it was bought up by Ray Montgomery, who had run the small press that published the original books, but had not held the original trademark on it.

So we have examples of how a lack of a common "intellectual property" law enabled greater creativity, and how a current "intellectual property" law stupidly limits the option of using the most reasonable description of the work.

Either way, the book looks absolutely awesome, and if you want in on the Kickstarter offering, there are just a few hours left.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
]]>you-can't-do-this-with-catcher-in-the-ryehttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20121219/11025021439Mon, 26 Sep 2011 05:33:30 PDTDid A Few Million Virtual Monkeys Randomly Recreate Shakespeare? Not ReallyMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110925/22403016086/did-few-million-virtual-monkeys-randomly-recreate-shakespeare-not-really.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110925/22403016086/did-few-million-virtual-monkeys-randomly-recreate-shakespeare-not-really.shtmlSlashdot alerts us to a report that a guy who set up a few million virtual monkeys trying to recreate Shakespeare -- a la the infinite monkey theorem -- has succeeded in recreating its first work of Shakespeare. Specifically, it's A Lover's Complaint, which is a narrative poem that was apparently published as an appendix to a book of Shakespeare's sonnets.

Of course, looking over the details, I'm a lot less impressed than I thought I would be. My understanding of the "infinite monkeys" idea was that you had those million monkeys typing away, and in some potentially near-infinite amount of time, one of them would actually craft the works of Shakespeare. Or, at the very least, that multiple monkeys would individually create the different works of Shakesepeare. But as far as I can tell from the guy's description, it sounds like he's taking any 9-character segment that matches any 9-character segment of a Shakespearean work and declaring the segment it "done." The process continues, filling in other random 9-character segments, until the entire work is done. That's not nearly as impressive. What would it take to get virtual monkeys to write an entire work of Shakespeare in one go? Or even just one sentence? That seems like a much more challenging problem... so this one is actually a bit disappointing.

In the meantime, as one of the articles about this project notes, when real monkeys were given real typewriters:

"Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages consisting largely of the letter S, they began by attacking the keyboard with a stone, then proceeded to urinate and defecate on it."

So there's that. But let's see the virtual monkeys do something a little more advanced before we cheer them on.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
]]>not-yethttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110925/22403016086Mon, 27 Jun 2011 04:43:33 PDTJulie Taymor Blames Twitter For Bad Reviews Of 'Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark'Mike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110621/11242114788/julie-taymor-blames-twitter-bad-reviews-spiderman-turn-off-dark.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110621/11242114788/julie-taymor-blames-twitter-bad-reviews-spiderman-turn-off-dark.shtmlSpider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, you've been missing a massive train wreck in slow motion. Julie Taymor, who was the original person behind the effort was fired in March and has finally spoken out about the scathing reviews the show has received all along (apparently, the only reason to go see the show is in the hopes of catching someone get injured). Apparently it's not her fault, the fault of any of the other writers, actors, musicians, etc. No, no. You see, it's all Twitter's fault. Apparently, with people writing bad reviews on Twitter, the producers overreacted:

Breaking her silence about “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” the Broadway musical from which she was fired in March, Julie Taymor tacitly criticized her former producers on Saturday afternoon for relying on audience focus groups and said that the rise of Twitter and blogs for instant theater criticism was damaging to shows...

“It’s very scary if people are going more towards that, to have audiences tell you how to make a show,” she said. “Shakespeare would have been appalled. Forget about it. It would be impossible to have these works come out because there’s always something that people don’t like.”

[...]

“Twitter and Facebook and blogging just trump you,” Ms. Taymor said during a moderated discussion at the annual meeting of the Theater Communications Group, an umbrella organization of regional and nonprofit theaters. “It’s very hard to create. It’s incredibly difficult to be under a shot glass and a microscope like that.”

Well, well. It turns out that not only is Taymor not very good at judging the quality of this particular play, but she seems rather ignorant on history as well. Clive Thompson reminds us that the audience in Shakespeare time didn't quietly type their opinion of the plays they were seeing into the internet, they spoke up about it immediately:

Shakespeare's audience was far more boisterous than are patrons of the theatre today. They were loud and hot-tempered and as interested in the happenings off stage as on. One of Shakespeare's contemporaries noted that "you will see such heaving and shoving, such itching and shouldering to sit by the women, such care for their garments that they be not trod on . . . such toying, such smiling, such winking, such manning them home ... that it is a right comedy to mark their behaviour" (Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse, 1579). The nasty hecklers and gangs of riffraff would come from seedy parts in and around London like Tower-hill and Limehouse and Shakespeare made sure to point them out:

These are the youths that thunder at a playhouse,
and fight for bitten apples; that no audience, but
the Tribulation of Tower-hill, or the Limbs of
Limehouse, their dear brothers, are able to endure.
(Henry VIII, 5.4.65-8)

On top of that, Thompson also points out that even audiences for plays in New York City haven't always been so nice, pointing to the famed Astor Place riots that happened as anti-England sentiment in New York City at the time caused audience members to start "loudly voicing their disapproval with booing and hissing" during Shakespeare's plays, leading to the eventual riot:

The most brutal of these eruptions occurred as a result of two rival actors, each of whom was starring in a competing production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Celebrated American actor Edwin Forrest, who patriotically extolled the virtues of the American Dream of self-actualization, employed a performing style that was passionate and visceral. English actor William Charles Macready, on the other hand, had an elitist attitude, a poised stature, and an approach to acting that was more subtle and cerebral. When Macready and Forrest both presented the play on May 7, audience members booed and heckled Macready, then started throwing objects at the stage, and the performance had to stop with almost half of the play unperformed. Macready was ready to go back to England; but as Lawrence W. Levine notes, a letter from individuals including authors Herman Melville and Washington Irving—insisting that Americans would be civilized enough to allow him to perform—convinced him to stay. The result was disastrous: although Macready was able to make it through the full performance at the Astor Place Opera House on May 10, a crowd of working-class men attacked the theatre with the intention of causing severe damage. The rioters backed down only after militia opened fire into the crowd, killing at least 22 and as many as 31 people. As Nigel Cliff notes in The Shakespeare Riots, “Never in the nation’s history had soldiers fired volley after volley at point-blank range into a civilian crowd.” And this infamous event is a disturbing milestone in the lore of the Macbeth curse. Perhaps it is only fitting that the riot resulted from a play that mentions the word "blood" and its variants a whopping 41 times.

It seems like having some fans bitch about a crappy stage production that seemed like a bad idea from the very beginning seems rather tame in comparison, Julie.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
]]>denial-runs-deephttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110621/11242114788Tue, 15 Feb 2011 12:42:49 PSTWould Shakespeare Have Survived Today's Copyright Laws?Mike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110215/11165113112/would-shakespeare-have-survived-todays-copyright-laws.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110215/11165113112/would-shakespeare-have-survived-todays-copyright-laws.shtmlobsession with "piracy" was misplaced, and probably not in the best interests of the authors he represented. We also posted a compelling response to Turow. Rather than take the time to understand the arguments and the data on this subject, it appears that Turow and the Authors Guild are doubling down on the "but... but... piracy!" argument, along with a good heaping of "the government must do something!"

Turow, along with Authors Guild executive director Paul Aiken and Authors Guild board member (and apparent Shakespeare expert) James Shapiro, have an op-ed piece in the NY Times that a whole bunch of you have been sending in, in which they assert that Shakespeare might not have been able to survive the web era, because of all of this "piracy." The argument is quite a bit stretched, but see if you can follow me: because playwrights had physical scarcity, in that they could keep people out of the playhouses unless people paid to enter, it allowed playwrighting to flourish. They call this a "cultural paywall." Then there's some sort of bizarre leap about how copyright is really the same thing. It's not. And, then it leaps to something about how stricter copyright laws are, ipso facto, better. The evidence for this? Shhhh, don't bother the Authors Guild bosses with logic! And, of course, the inevitable punchline is the idea that Shakespeare wouldn't have survived in this online era with all this piracy and stuff.

Of course, it's difficult to think of a worse example than Shakespeare for this argument (and sort of bizarre that Shapiro would sign off on an op-ed that so thoroughly misrepresents Shakespeare). Of course, as most of you know, an awful lot of Shakespeare's works are copies (sometimes directly) of earlier works. Sometimes they're derivative, but other times, he copied wholesale from others. So the bigger question might not be if Shakespeare could survive all the file sharing going on today, but whether or not he'd be able to produce any of his classic works, since they'd all be tied up in lawsuits over copyright infringement.

Furthermore, the reason Shakespeare was able to make money by selling tickets was because seats in a theater are a real scarcity, and selling real -- not artificial -- scarcities is still a damn good business model today. Shakespeare could still make a killing on Broadway. Or he could go into the movie business and sell tickets to seats in theaters. There are plenty of real scarcities he could focus on. Jumping from real scarcities to artificial scarcities such as copyright, suggests that Turow and the others at the Authors Guild still don't even quite understand what they're arguing for.

Separately, it's disheartening to see Turow -- who really should be seeking out actual evidence -- dismiss anyone who has that evidence by writing them off as "a handful of law professors and other experts who have made careers of fashioning counterintuitive arguments holding that copyright impedes creativity and progress." First of all, it's not just "a handful," and these folks aren't just coming up with "counterintuitive theories," they're often looking at what the actual data says -- something Turow apparently refuses to do.

Paul Friedman, who isn't just a law professor, but also has a long history practicing law, has a nice response to Turow in which he cites the always entertaining Judge Alex Kozinski in warning folks of the dangers of overly fetishizing stronger intellectual property laws as something that must be good. What makes it even more amusing is that Kozinski uses Turow's most famous book to make his point.

That said, a growing percentage of the population is realizing that this obsession with "stronger copyrights must be good" makes less and less sense. And as the Authors Guild continues to have out-of-touch, fact-challenged people lead it, it's only going to serve to drive younger authors away from the Guild. Smart authors today recognize the maxim that obscurity is a much bigger threat than piracy, and many have come to figure out that piracy is nothing to fear if you have a smart business model.

If Turow and the Authors Guild really wanted to help authors, they'd focus on helping them understand new business models, rather than supporting ever more draconian laws that will do nothing to help and plenty to hurt.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
]]>seems like a better questionhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110215/11165113112Tue, 23 Jun 2009 08:22:00 PDTWould King Lear Ever Have Been Written If Copyright Law Existed?Mike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090621/1753275301.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090621/1753275301.shtmlKing Lear, noting how unlikely it is that King Lear would be written today under the same circumstances, since there would be numerous potential copyright claims:

If the current US Copyright Law had been in effect over Shakespeare, I think he could have been sued by many authors for copyright infringement for writing that masterpiece.

Count how many lawsuits there could have been just for King Lear alone:

Shakespeare's play is based on various accounts of the semi-legendary Celtic mythological figure Lear/Lir. Shakespeare's most important source is thought to be the second edition of The Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande by Raphael Holinshed, published in 1587. Holinshed himself found the story in the earlier Historia Regum Britanniae by Geoffrey of Monmouth, which was written in the 12th century. Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, published 1590, also contains a character named Cordelia, who also dies from hanging, as in King Lear.

Other possible sources are A Mirror for Magistrates (1574), by John Higgins; The Malcontent (1604), by John Marston; The London Prodigal (1605); Arcadia (1580-1590), by Sir Philip Sidney, from which Shakespeare took the main outline of the Gloucester subplot; Montaigne's Essays, which were translated into English by John Florio in 1603; An Historical Description of Iland of Britaine, by William Harrison; Remaines Concerning Britaine, by William Camden (1606); Albion's England, by William Warner, (1589); and A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures, by Samuel Harsnett (1603), which provided some of the language used by Edgar while he feigns madness. King Lear is also a literary variant of a common fairy tale, in which a father rejects his youngest daughter for a statement of her love that does not please him.[5]

The source of the subplot involving Gloucester, Edgar, and Edmund is a tale in Philip Sidney's Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, with a blind Paphlagonian king and his two sons, Leonatus and Plexitrus.[6]

How many lawsuits do you see? At least a half dozen? I even see some methods and concepts claims, if we view it with modern copyright owner eyes. Remember J.K. Rowling's litigation over methods and concepts that Darl McBride and Chris Sontag cited? I suppose he could have raised a transformational fair use claim. But what if he accessed the prior works in digital format? Does fair use exist there? Or maybe they'd have been DRM'd. He'd maybe then never have read them.

Of course, what really would have happened is there never would have been a King Lear written. It would have been too legally risky. You can go to jail for copyright infringement, after all, even if you are noncommercial, if you distribute a DVD, and if we are imagining, let's imagine Shakespeare did that. Shakespeare wasn't even noncommercial. And there are criminal sanctions under regular Copyright Law, too.

If Shakespeare had plenty of money, he could have contacted all the copyright owners and paid them whatever they asked, but if he didn't have enough money, the result would have been he would have been unable to afford to write King Lear. Do we want a world where Shakespeare can only write King Lear if he has money? If you think I exaggerate, remember what happened to internet radio? And if one song is worth $80,000, is the sky not the limit, if you are a copyright owner and hold all the legal cards and can get Congress to keep upping the ante to suit you?

Incidentally, has anyone done a study to see how many songs in the history of the world earned $80,000 for their authors?

If King Lear had been written anyway, despite the odds, Shakespeare could have been sued for copyright infringement, one case after another, and his reputation would have been ruined, probably being branded a willful copyright infringer instead of an artistic genius, which he was, willfulness being assumed under the law, a rebuttable presumption, and he'd have likely faced damages equivalent to a lifetime of indentured servitude.

Indeed. This is a point that needs to be repeated again and again -- and yet for some reason, industry execs, politicians and even many in the press seem to buy (hook, line and proverbial sinker) the idea that copyright is somehow necessary for the creation of great works, and that such punishment is reasonable under the law. They'll claim that Shakespeare (or his modern equivalent) should simply write something different -- though ignoring how this would rid the world of King Lear. Shakespeare didn't rely on copyright to earn a living. Copyright is one form of enforcing a business model, but it is hardly the only one.